As more and more companies hop on the A.I. train in what seems like a panicked game of musical chairs, the implication is that they're all investing in the future. It's a future when the machines do most of the work, if not all of it, and the executives sit back and reap the rewards, patting themselves on the back for having such keen foresight.
That might not be what's happening. In fact, it just might be actual panic driving the decisions in those executive boardrooms right now.
Think about it for a minute. Artificial intelligence isn't really new, by any stretch of the imagination. A.I. has been scaring the job prospects out of blue-collar and white-collar workers alike for decades now. And machine learning, robotics, driverless cars, and cashierless checkouts -- all of these have been pretty commonplace for a while.
So why now? And why ChatGPT, or generative A.I.? What's got everyone falling all over themselves to be the prime mover in this somewhat innocuous leg of the A.I. race?
Is the future really going to be about slightly better chatbots and deepfake porn?
That got me thinking. Maybe it's not a bet on the future. Maybe it's a not-so-distant early warning.
Maybe it's the end of SaaS.
Remember Compaq?
Probably not. And that's my point.
Compaq is maybe the best example of the most successful desktop PC maker to completely miss the onset of the laptop. Apple, Dell, even HP all got the message that an immobile computing box was no longer going to cut it.
Did Compaq miss a shift in form factor? Not really. What it missed was the onset of the home broadband connection via WiFi, which would not be in full swing until some years later. Dial-up was still a thing, so software designers started "sacrificing" UX and UI to fit the smaller screen, the thinner client, and the narrower UI pipe.
So why do I bring this up?
Because there were also companies that fully missed the boat on mobile. Hardware companies like Microsoft were too late to the game and their phones were wanna-be flops. Software companies like, well, Microsoft, still have very much a "desktop-first" approach to their offerings.
And again, this didn't have to do with the size of the screen or the form factor of the device. Well, it did, but it was mostly about user interface, and primarily, user input.
That's what I believe is driving the panic in the adoption of generative A.I. It's not the thickness of the client or the size of the screen, it's that those concepts are on the way out altogether.
Users Don't Want Another Screen
This is a sentence that's worked its way into my product advisory lexicon over the last several years, and as time has gone on, I've been hearing and saying it more and more. The pushback against yet another screen is the first domino, and it's falling.
It's telling that the push is for "fewer screens" and not "fewer apps."
Any software screen generator will tell you that the usefulness of the output of their software is directly related to the level of detail they can collect from the user. It's no secret that as the shift to mobile-first became more prevalent, text input continued to be replaced by taps, choices, and sliders. Even voice.
Sure, no one likes a mobile keyboard. But the truth is, no one likes input. And this is the shift that means that something as relatively simple as generative A.I. can make a huge difference. It's not the tech that fills in the gaps in the pixels of an A.I.-generated image. It's the tech that fills in the gaps in the context of the prompt for that image.
Simplify or Die
A few weeks ago I had coffee with a friend who wanted to show me his app. His idea is solid, exciting, even. The use case is a problem that definitely needs a solution, and the industry is loaded with stupid money. Check. Check. Check.
Then he showed me the app, and I figuratively threw up all over it.
To his credit, the app took in a lot of input from the user in a very simple touch/tap/slide way. Then the app took that data and everyone else's data and aggregated it and crunched it all and returned... way too much data back.
Admittedly, my friend comes from the long, long ago software development days. What he had produced was the equivalent of a business intelligence system that didn't solve the problem, but rearranged the data so that the problem had more context and could be easily(?) solved by humans. This is what BI systems do. Which is why they're all scrambling for Generative A.I. I know this because they keep calling me.
So then I asked him the first thing that popped into my head, "Can you get all those beautifully animated charts and graphs down to a single sentence recommendation?"
Which, no coincidence, is exactly what Generative A.I. does.
He looked at me like I asked him to grow a second head.
I'm onto something.
The Next SaaS Won't Need a Screen
Elegance has always been at the forefront of innovative software.
The next generation of business and personal applications won't need to spit screens of data back to the user. Or any kind of feedback. They'll just do what you ask them to do.
Think of Generative A.I. as the stepping stone. You ask a question. You get an answer. You use that answer to formulate a decision.
The next level of A.I. makes decisions for you, based on what it has learned about what you would have done. That's the intriguing (and admittedly scary) part of A.I. And it might just mean the end of software as we know it today.
BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, TEACHINGSTARTUP.COM@JPROCO
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